This invention relates to the storage of a multitude of flat collectible items in an orderly, secure and easily reviewable array.
Flat collectible items such as stamps, coins, sports cards and the like which are generally stored in multi-paged albums are valuable possessions which the collector wishes to store in a protective yet easily viewable and re-arrangeable manner. The sports cards contain a picture of a personality well known in sports such as baseball, football, basketball or hockey. In recent years a new industry, grading services, has been created in order to stabilize rare coins and sports cards as an investment. For a fee, a grading service will examine a coin or sports card, grade it, and seal it in a tamper-proof case or "slab" which contains a serial number for the coin or card as well as its grade. Such encased or "slabbed" collectible items are a much more liquid asset than "loose", unauthenticated and ungraded items.
The cases or slabs are fabricated of a transparent plastic such as polyacrylate, and may have various sizes or shapes. A problem for buyers of such slabbed collectibles is to find practical storage means which affords some measure of security while permitting easy review or display of the collection. Large sized briefcases are currently available to coin dealers for the protective storage and transportation of large numbers of coins. However, such briefcases are impractical for the average investor having relatively few coins, and where transportation is not an issue. Boxes having a number of specially configured retaining means are also in use by coin collectors, and these require that all the coin-confining plastic cases are of the same sIze and shape.
Whereas cases for coins are generally of square configuration, cases for sports cards are of elongated rectangular configuration. A holding device for flat collectible items has been disclosed in parent application Ser. No. 361,639, said device being exemplified primarily for use with encased coins which are held by suction cups in panels which may serve as "pages" of a binder album. It has been found desirable to reduce the thickness of the panels so that more panels can be held by an album. When suction cups of thinner front-to rear size are utilized in an effort to reduce the thickness of a panel, it has been found that a single suction cup lacks sufficient holding power to retain the elongated cases.
It is accordingly an object of the present invention to provide a device and system for storing encased flat collectable items in an orderly array.
It is another object of this invention to provide a device and system as in the foregoing object which permits easy addition, removal, and review of the encased items.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a device and system of the aforesaid nature capable of protectively storing within a relatively compact space a variable number of variously shaped plastic cases that confine flat collectable items.
It is a still further object of this invention to provide a device and system of the aforesaid nature of durable construction and amenable to low cost manufacture.
These objects and other objects and advantages of the invention will be apparent from the following description.